In large medical facilities such as hospitals or group practices run by physicians individual patients are often examined and treated by a number of specialists in succession. For example it may be necessary for the purposes of a treatment first to have X-rays prepared by a radiologist, whereupon subsequently a treating physician will make a medical diagnosis on the basis of said X-rays.
In order to enable the work of a plurality of specialists to be coordinated it is sometimes the practice nowadays in a medical facility to provide computer workstations at which the specialists are presented with an onscreen display of lists containing activities which they have to carry out on a particular working day for example. A list for a specialist is generated based on a review of patient data records in order to determine whether, for example, new image data relating to said patients has been stored which it is necessary for the specialist to evaluate. If this is the case, the name of the patient and an activity that is to be performed for this patient are included in the list. The programs for automatically generating such lists are often developed specially for individual departments in a medical facility so that specific features in the workflows in the respective department can be taken into account.
For developers of organization programs of the aforesaid kind it is particularly labor-intensive and time-consuming to provide the programs for different departments, since only rarely can parts of an already developed organization program be reused. This makes programs for medical institutions very expensive in terms of both initial procurement and maintenance.
Furthermore it is also necessary for a specialist who alternates between two departments always to be instructed in the operation and use of the respective organization program.
In conjunction with the organization program individual specialists must also use further utility routines in order to be able to complete an activity assigned to them. For example, in order to produce a diagnosis a physician must first search in a data network by way of a file browser in order to locate the image data which a radiologist, for example, generated the day before. Then he/she must have the X-ray images displayed by means of an image viewing program. By way of a further program he/she must finally document the produced diagnostic findings in a written record. Providing this multiplicity of programs implies a high level of expenditure when it comes to equipping a department with computer workstations at which all activities arising in the department can be accomplished. The training of the specialists is also commensurately costly and time-consuming.
Since individual specialists carry out their activities at different computer workstations, tracking down image data can also present problems. In particular in the case of an interdepartmental coordination of activities, when for example a separate department for radiology is present in a hospital, it may be necessary in certain circumstances for a specialist to search for image data relating to a particular patient on different data servers.
In connection with the production of slide presentations it is known from the computer program product PowerPoint® of the company Microsoft® to create, for a plurality of presentation slides that are to have a uniform layout and a common slide frame, each slide in each case from at least two sub-slides. Here, the frame is determined using a sub-slide designated as the master page. Also present on a master page are free fields. These fields are then filled with content via at least one further sub-slide, called a presentation page. Slide presentations having a uniform look-and-feel can then be produced by always using the same master page and different presentation pages.